For example, a major reason that baby boys and girls come into the world with different brains and bodies is that baby boys produce high levels of the male hormone, testosterone, in utero.
Exposure to prenatal testosterone directs the cells in their growing bodies to organize themselves in the ways that we recognize as being male. They tell the reproductive organ cells to build penises and testes, and tell the brain cells to organize themselves in a way that predicts earlier gross motor development but later language stills. In the absence of prenatal testosterone, all babies look and act just like little girls, even when they’re not.
Reklam
But hormones play a vital role in organizing how the body and brain are put together, too. These are called organizational effects, and they don’t go away once the hormone is removed. In this role, the hormones actually influence how the body and brain are built, which means that the effects are pretty much permanent.
Hiçbir yerde “biz yapacağız” deme-dik, tam aksine her zaman “birlikte yapacağız” dedik. Bu sadece daha şık durduğu için tercih ettiğimiz bir yönelim değil. Solcu olmanın özü de budur: Sol, halkın özne haline gelmesiyle başlar.
One of my graduate students, Hannah Bradshaw, has preliminary results suggesting that this very thing might go on. Across two studies, she found that pill-taking women performed worse than naturally cycling women on a difficult exam and were quicker to give up on unsolvable word puzzles. Although it is as of yet unclear whether these effects are driven by changes in the pill-taking women’s stress responses, hippocampi, or something else altogether, these results are consistent with the idea that the pill may harm the capacity to regulate learning, which could make it more difficult for these women to meet their educational and career goals.
Men’s brains have been wired for child care. And their changing testosterone is instrumental in shifting them from mating mode to parenting mode. When it’s time to switch from being Don Juan to being someone’s dad, men’s brains order less testosterone released as a means of telling the body that it’s time to execute the dad software.
Reklam